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What is "-ana"

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-ana

-ana (more frequently -iana) is a suffix of Latin origin, used in English to convert nouns, usually proper names, into mass nouns, as in Shakespeareana or Dickensiana, items or stories related to William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens, respectively.

The recognition of this usage as a self-conscious literary construction, typically as a book title, traces back at least to 1740, when it was mentioned in an edition of Scaligerana, a collection of table talk of Joseph Justus Scaliger, from around 150 years previously. By that period Scaliger was described as "the father, so to speak, of all those books published under the title of -ana".

As grammatical construction it is the neuter plural, nominative form of an adjective: so from Scaliger is formed first the adjective Scaligeranus (Scaligeran) which is then put into the form of an abstract nounScaligerana (Scaligeran things). In Americana, a variant construction, the adjectival form already exists as Americanus, so it is simply a neuter plural (suffix –a on the stem American-); the case of Victoriana, things associated with the Victorian period, is superficially similar, but the Latin adjective form is Dog Latin.